Diane Arbus

by Patricia Bosworth

  It distressed her that a great deal of the attention she was receiving came from “weirdos.” A photographer in Massachusetts kept phoning her because he was sure she was into “morgue photography,” the way he was. He kept calling her and calling her, demanding to see her. She kept putting him off. All she really wanted to do, she kept telling her friends, was to work in peace and solitude without any pressures or expectations.

  On her own, she had begun to photograph bondage houses. She’d shown Nancy Grossman a picture of a woman done up in high boots and not much else debasing a naked man down on all fours. The image was assaulting, Nancy says. It was like looking at a literal description of the act. Diane seemed a little scared and shocked when she handed it to Nancy, but she said nothing. She showed Peter Beard a photograph of “a Wall Street banker type, nude, getting hot wax poured on him.” Beard says he and Diane were planning to “swap pictures—she wanted some of my big-game stuff from Africa—but then her stuff was big game, too. I always thought Diane had such guts. To go into places like bondage houses—really rough. I always wondered how did she do it?”

  Later John Gossage recalled a statement Diane had made which might have explained her courage: “Once I dreamed I was on a gorgeous ocean liner. All pale, gilded, encrusted with rococo—like a wedding cake. There was smoke in the air and people were drinking and gambling. I knew the ship was on fire and we were sinking slowly; they knew it, too, but they were very gay and dancing and singing and a little delirious. There was no hope. I was terribly elated. I could photograph anything I wanted.”

  And yet finally even that wasn’t enough. In order to perfect her art, she had cut herself off from so many people. She was lonely, she was alone—and she would fall into despair.

  Deep in depression, she would seek out Lisette Model. She was closer than ever to her teacher, phoning her or going to her tiny black apartment on Abingdon Square. And Model was worried, because sometime in June Diane had phoned to tell her that she’d reversed her opinion about the retardate pictures—she hated them now, hated them because she couldn’t control them! She had always controlled her pictures before—with the flash and her square format, she had imprisoned her subjects as if in a vise. But the Pentax was different, and of course the retardates were different from any other subjects: they did not collaborate with her in the making of the pictures—they didn’t look her in the eye, they didn’t acknowledge her presence or tell her their stories, nor were they charmed or seduced by her. Lined up in their Halloween costumes on the grass, they were in a trance. A strange illumination—almost an exaltation—rose up from their chunky bodies, their upturned, oversized heads. Their world, made up of noises and stampings and rolling about on the grass, was a world she could never know, could never enter, and this angered and frustrated her, depressed her. Not long after she phoned Model, she wrote her a note which read, “DEAREST LISETTE” in big block letters, and at the bottom of the page, in tiny, shaky letters, “diane.”

  And yet she could be charming and assured when the situation warranted. She lectured at the about-to-open International Center of Photography and compared taking pictures to “tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies out of the fridge.”

  At Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, in June of 1971, she impressed Jerry Liebling and his students with her comments about photographing nudists. “There are two kinds of nudist camps—one is sanctimonious, almost prissy, the other is swinging—the Grossinger’s of nudist camps.” At Hampshire, Diane taught an advanced class on portraiture along with Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. Liebling recalls, “Everything was confrontational because that’s where things were in those days. Everybody did exercises to get in touch with their personal feelings. I have a photograph somewhere of a class where we’re all covering our faces, trying to summon up deep emotion.”

  Many of the kids had already seen Diane’s work and they related to her savage yet vulnerable images. Some of them were even more intrigued with her persona. She was aware that they liked her—she seemed open and unthreatening, not at all like a teacher. But there was something unsettling about her, too. One student recalls shaking her hand and finding it freezing cold to the touch, even though the day was exceedingly hot. Her deep-set eyes glared—severe, dead on. And then she’d grin suddenly and you’d see that part of a front tooth seemed to be missing—you couldn’t really tell because she’d hold her hand to her mouth when she smiled. And she’d go right on talking. While she was there, Diane went swimming every day in a pond outside Amherst. A student took a photograph of her posing in the grass in her bathing suit. And Amy, who was staying in a nearby summer camp, came to visit.

  When she returned to New York, Diane received a letter from “the little people’s convention” (midgets who were gathering in Florida for an annual meeting), turning down her request to photograph them. “We have our own little person to photograph us,” the letter said. Diane was extremely upset about this and mentioned it to most of her friends.

  At about this time Marvin Israel was working on a miniature sculpture of a person of no specific sex lying on a bed. The person’s wrists were obviously slashed. Diane helped him complete it.

  By now, in late June, a humid heat had descended on New York. Diane hated and feared the summer. It reminded her of her childhood long ago when her nanny—her beloved Mamselle—had abruptly left. From then on, every summer had brought back to her the pain of that loss. Her parents had always been away in the summer, too, traveling around Europe. After camp, Diane and Howard and Renée would return to the big apartment on Central Park West and be looked after by bored servants—they weren’t often permitted to go out, and remained for hours in the airless rooms, Diane counting the silver and feeling that life was unlived and unlivable.

  Now New York’s million air-conditioners hummed and traffic snarled in the streets and many of Diane’s friends escaped to the beach or the mountains, and the old hurtful feeling—the almost physical grip of anxiety at abandonment—returned to haunt her.

  She still didn’t have enough assignments, so would sometimes take pictures of media events and sell them later. That’s why she attended a press conference for Germaine Greer held at Sardi’s.

  Greer—formidably intelligent and imposing, over six feet tall and clad in buckskin skirt and clogs—had just come back from England to continue promoting her best-seller The Female Eunuch around the United States. She had already created a sensation at Town Hall, debating Norman Mailer on female sexuality. She’d been on the cover of Life and she was in New York for the express purpose of emceeing the Dick Cavett show.

  Today Greer says her first impression of Diane was of “a rosepetal-soft, delicate little girl. I couldn’t guess how old she was, but she charmed me in her safari jacket and short-cropped hair. She was carrying such an enormous bag of camera equipment I almost offered to carry it for her—she could barely lug it around. She hopped around photographing me, and when she said she’d like to have a proper photographic session alone with me, I agreed. I recognized her name and thought, ‘Why not?’

  “It was a hot, muggy day,” Greer goes on. “I was staying at the Chelsea Hotel in a seedy room. Diane arrived and immediately asked me to lie down on my bed. I was tired, God knows I was tired—I’d been flogging my book like mad—so I did what she told me. Then all of a sudden she knelt on the bed and hung over me with this wide-angle lens staring me in the face and began click-clicking away.

  “It developed into sort of a duel between us, because I resisted being photographed like that—close-up with all my pores and lines showing! She kept asking me all sorts of personal questions, and I became aware that she would only shoot when my face was showing tension or concern or boredom or annoyance (and there was plenty of that, let me tell you), but because she was a woman I didn’t tell her to fuck off. If she’d been a man, I’d have kicked her in the balls.

  “It was tyranny. Really tyranny. Diane Arbus ended up straddling m
e—this frail little person kneeling, keening over my face. I felt completely terrorized by the blasted lens. It was a helluva struggle. Finally I decided, ‘Damn it, you’re not going to do this to me, lady. I’m not going to be photographed like one of your grotesque freaks!’ So I stiffened my face like a mask. Diane went right on merrily photographing—clickclickclick-click—cajoling me, teasing me, flattering me. This frail rosepetal creature kept at me like a laser beam, clickclickclick. She’d jump off the bed periodically to reload the camera. Just as I was breathing a sigh of relief, she’d be on top of me again! It was a battle between us. Who won? It was a draw. After that afternoon I never saw her again. I never saw the photographs either.”

  The first weekend in July, Diane went out to East Hampton to visit Tina Fredericks, who was getting to be one of the biggest real-estate agents on Long Island—she owned land and two houses and her phone never stopped ringing. But to Diane, Tina remained simply one of her oldest friends—an ebullient, auburn-haired woman who had been one of the first people to encourage her in photography. Diane loved coming to Tina’s—it was like another home, and she would eat her delicious food and swim and walk on the beach for hours.

  Tina says she knew Diane was very depressed and kept trying to cheer her up. “I said I would buy one of her portfolios—I’d buy two or three if she wanted me to. She didn’t seem to hear me.”

  Instead, that weekend Diane took pictures of Tina’s lovely twenty-one-year-old daughter, Devon. “She made me put on a leotard top and she took tons of photographs and when she sent us the contacts a week later, I thought, ‘But I don’t look like that at all.’ I was unrecognizable. Now, ten years later, I’ve grown into the face Diane Arbus saw in me then.”

  Before she took the train back to New York, Larry Shainberg drove over from Amagansett to see her. She repeated what she’d told him over and over again in the last months—that she didn’t know how much longer she could go on. Shainberg says, “I didn’t believe her. I tried to kid her out of it. I don’t think anybody believed she would actually…” Other friends also ignored her allusions to suicide. “We had our own lives to lead,” says a poet from Westbeth. “And we didn’t know how to deal with it—she was getting so tough to handle—really heavy. It was excruciatingly depressing to be with her. She would drag you down—she would bore you. But in retrospect a lot of us feel guilty about not being there when she needed us.”

  There were other friends who noticed that she was “tying things up.” She wrote to Pati Hill in Paris saying she had gathered up all her letters of twenty-five years and would Pati like them back? She phoned Tina Fredericks to say happily that Doon and Amy were both settled—Doon at work, Amy in school—and Allan was at last getting his big break in a movie. Years later Amy told friends that she thought her mother had done what she wanted to do in this life—there was simply nothing more she wanted to accomplish.

  Cornell Capa had been trying to bring Diane together with Marge Neikrug, who had just opened a little photography gallery in her brownstone on East 68th Street. Marge wanted to learn how to print—“I’d fallen in love with the darkroom”—and Capa suggested that Diane Arbus might help her. The two women had a series of long conversations over a period of several weeks. “But I couldn’t pin Diane down as to when we’d get together. Then about a week before she died she suddenly appeared at my gallery with her portfolio and we started talking… I’d played tennis with Harold Russek and that got her started on her family, whom she seemed obsessed with, and then we went from there to her portfolio and we made a list of the museums we hoped would buy them. I loved her work and told her I’d give her a show. She seemed agreeable. I asked if I could keep her portfolio overnight to study it, but she was possessive about it and wouldn’t let me borrow it. She was very charming, but seemed tormented in some way—I couldn’t figure out why. Something profound was bothering her. She talked about the future and photography and politics. She talked very fast, all in a rush, as if she was thinking too fast, and sometimes after she’d say something she’d contradict herself totally, but it was still a marvelous conversation that lasted five hours and then suddenly in the middle of a sentence Diane got up with her portfolio and bolted out of my gallery.”

  She began phoning compulsively. She phoned her mother in Florida, begging her to tell her how she’d coped with her depression back in the 1930s. She kept asking, “Mommy, Mommy, what happened? How did you get over it?” Gertrude Nemerov says she didn’t have an answer. “ ‘I don’t know, darling,’ I said, and then I asked her if the therapist was helping and she told me, ‘No, no,’ and then she talked about her pictures not selling and how she wasn’t getting enough assignments.”

  Later she phoned John Gossage, who was now living in Washington, D.C., to ask him, “Can’t you find anyone to buy one of my portfolios?” She phoned her old art teacher from Fieldston, Victor D’Amico, and said she had to see him and talk about her work. D’Amico told her he was busy but would try to see her soon. She phoned Lee Witkin. “The beautiful glass box Marvin Israel had designed for her portfolios was constantly breaking,” Witkin says. “Diane was in tears about that.”

  Her brother, Howard, visited her at Westbeth. He had been moving around in the past few years—from Bennington to Brandeis and now he was settled at Washington University in St. Louis, where he held a prestigious chair in literature. He and Peggy lived in a spacious house with their three sons and he was part of a lively circle of writers that included Stanley Elkin and William Gass. He should have been content, but he remained edgy and easily bored. He was depressed by his continuing self-doubt in spite of genuine achievements.

  All these years while he’d been sustained by his drive for perfection, for language in its purest, most concentrated, ordered, and expressive form, he’d made a supreme effort to conceal himself. He distanced his life, keeping it remote and formal except to a chosen few. Some of his closest friends, like Stanley Edgar Hyman and the painter Paul Feeley, had died, and although he wrote a great many letters, there were only a few people he felt close to; the constants after Diane were Kenneth Burke and his old English teacher Elbert Lenrow from Fieldston, who’d kept up with him regularly for forty years. To them he didn’t have to reveal his private upsets, his disappointments. “In poetry the art itself has got to be its own reward,” he once said dryly. He knew he would never get rich writing poetry, and only a few ever got famous, so there was little left to do except gossip, display, and jostle for position, and Howard (like Diane) enjoyed doing none of these things.

  Still, he’d applied himself—he’d worked very hard and finally honors would pile up: membership in the exclusive Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim. Eventually he would win both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in one year for his collected poetry. By 1971 he was a poets’ poet—admired by his peers for his intricate use of language, his deep erudition; criticized by others because he had never cut loose or “gone confessional” as had Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg. Nor would he capture the imagination of the American public as Robert Frost had, or William Carlos Williams.

  Only once could anyone remember him openly showing his frustration at being ignored. It happened at Bernard Malamud’s house in Cambridge when Malamud was teaching at Harvard. The other dinner guests were John Updike, Philip Rahv, and Robert Lowell. It was at the height of the Vietnam war. Lowell had been very involved in the anti-war demonstrations, and throughout dinner all attention focused on him as he spoke passionately and manically about his involvement. Although Howard and the others attempted to be heard, nobody else could so much as finish a sentence. Finally, as coffee was being served, Lowell pulled out a poem he’d written about Vietnam and read it aloud. When he finished, Howard got up abruptly and walked out the door. Later Lowell remarked, “Howard Nemerov is a minor poet, isn’t he?” And Bernard Malamud replied very quietly, “Who isn’t minor, Cal?” The subject was immediately dropped.

  When Howard and Diane met that evening in Jul
y, they didn’t discuss their careers; they never did. At the restaurant in the West Village where they had dinner, they reverted to the private language they’d always used as brother and sister—bantering, teasing, whispering conspiratorially, or just eating in silence as they had long ago on Central Park West with only their nannies for company.

  That night they spoke of their children and of their mother, who’d briefly remarried. (Diane said of her stepfather, “Mommy told me his mouth doesn’t water. My mouth waters at the thought.”)

  Howard says, “Diane seemed in a very good mood that evening. We had a marvelous time. Laughed quite a bit.” Just before they left the restaurant, she suddenly announced, “You know, I’m going to be remembered for being Howard Nemerov’s sister.” (“How ironic and untrue,” Howard says today.)

  He brought her back to Westbeth feeling that, despite her cheerfulness and jokes, “she was terribly alone.” The elevator they rode up in smelled of urine. The endless black hall which led to her apartment appeared shadowy and sinister. Howard was glad to leave.

  During the weekend of July 10, Diane visited Nancy Grossman and Anita Siegel’s loft. “She arrived Sunday afternoon, extremely distraught,” Grossman says. “She said, ‘We’re on the street.’ I thought she meant Marvin and she were on the street, but Marvin wasn’t with her. She stayed with Anita and me until after it got dark.

  “She had been close with Marvin twelve years, she said. He kept going off and she felt depressed and outside his life. The summers were always the worst for Diane and this summer was bad as usual; she felt general rage and depression about being kept out of his life.